5 Small Spiritual Habits That Will Make You Healthier Than 98% Of People
Train your brain for better overall health.
Lucas Prezeta | Pexels, DavidPrahl, Daboost | Canva In the quest for more balance, we often focus on habits. The healthy choice of breaking a bad habit or adding a good habit challenges our ability to stick to the decision to change for the better. A bad habit fades with clear intention combined with enough time for our brains to rebound from the adjustment.
Good habits emerge from a similar process. With a brain already in a state of adjustment, it can often be more efficient to swap habits and replace a bad one with a better one.
Here are 5 spiritual habits that will make you healthier than most people, according to YourTango experts.
1. Melt into meditation
Meditation has been scientifically proven to improve your health by lowering stress and cortisol levels. Reducing your fight or flight response through meditation allows you to experience the ups and downs of life with a greater sense of calm. The practice also reduces anxiety. When you meditate, you are in a peaceful state of mind, which provides more balance to your frantic day-to-day life.
— Ronnie Ann Ryan, Intuitive Coach
Photo: Olena Yakobchuk via Shutterstock
2. Build support networks through gratitude.
Practicing gratitude is a powerful spiritual habit that can significantly enhance your health. Physiologically, it boosts the immune system, lowers blood pressure, and reduces symptoms of illness. Gratitude increases dopamine and serotonin production, promoting feelings of happiness and well-being. You foster a positive mindset by regularly acknowledging and appreciating what you have rather than fixating on what you lack. This shift in perspective reduces stress and anxiety, contributing to better mental health. Additionally, gratitude strengthens social relationships vital for emotional support and resilience. In essence, gratitude is an emotion and a health-promoting practice embedded with wisdom.
— Clare Waismann, Counselor
3. Quiet mental chatter.
Concentration or fixed attentiveness meditation to quiet "monkey mind" (mind chatter). A disciplined and consistent (daily) meditation practice will provide relaxation, refreshment, and rejuvenation to provide what could be described as "super" powers — an ability to manage the inevitable and ongoing challenges of everyday existence and an ability to take on so much more than you ever thought possible, increasing flexibility, resilience, self-awareness, self-care, and overall improved health.
— Liz Zed, Spiritual coach
4. Stay aware of triggers
Just as we need boundaries in other areas of our lives, we need boundaries with our thoughts. When you notice your thoughts and words going into an unhealthy, fear-based language, stop. Stay aware of the triggers that send you into a low vibrational mindset. You are in control of your thoughts, mindset, and life experience.
— Polly Wirum, Spiritual Coach and Psychic
5. Let yourself loose.
Sometimes, we get way too serious about life and forget to live in the moment and have fun. With everything going on around us, it is hard to take time out and enjoy life.
This constant state of stress creates negative vibes and makes manifesting that much more difficult. It is okay to stop and smell the roses. Your problems will still be there when you finish.
— NyRee Ausler, CPP, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, Author
Awareness, awareness, awareness. Know where you are, who you are, what you do, and why you do it. You'll be ready to take your healthy-balanced self and be better than the previous revision. When you go to the next level, your awareness of self and others becomes the seed of progress to focus your intention. Meditation to quiet mind chatter will refresh and renew you to bring a balance of mind, body, and spirit. More awareness of triggers or roadblocks of unproductive negativity will set you loose from stress build-up and emerge as a healthier version of yourself.
Will Curtis is a writer and editor for YourTango. He's been featured on the Good Men Project and taught English abroad for ten years.